Page:The lady or the tiger and other stories, Stockton (Scribner's 1897 ed).djvu/194

184 plate-glass windows, or high ceilings, or hot and cold water in every room, or stationary wash-tubs, or any of that sort of thing. They had small windows with little panes of glass set in lead, and they had low rooms with often no ceiling at all, so that you could see the construction of the floor overhead, and they had all the old inconveniences that we have cast aside. If you want your furniture to look like what it makes believe to be you ought to have it in a regular Middle-Age house,—Elizabethan or Mary Annean, or whatever they call that sort of architecture. You could easily build such a house something like that inconvenient edifice put up by the English commissioners at the Centennial Exhibition; and if you want to sell this house"——

"Which I don't," I replied quickly. "If I do any thing, I'll alter this place. I'm not going to build another."

As I said, this speech of Tom's disturbed us; and after talking about the matter for some days we determined to be consistent, and we had our house altered so that Tom declared it was a regular Eastlake house and no mistake. We had a doleful time while the alterations were going on; and when all was dope and we had settled down to quiet again, we missed very many of the comforts and conveniences to which we had been accustomed. But we were getting used to missing comfort; and so we sat and looked out of our little square window-panes, and tried to think the landscape as lovely and the sky as spacious and blue as when we viewed it through our high and wide French-plate windows.